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Give Weight

We all know that throughout the centuries in the classical ballet, the danser ideally has been light as a feather and has thus given an illusion of weightlessness to the audience.

Some people feel that ballerinas represent a bad role model side by side with the top models, both spreading the ideal of a starving thin woman by their professions and by doing so contribute to increase the extent of eating disorders. I do understand this anxiety of those who have lived anorexia or close to someone suffering from it. But still, not everybody who’s slim or skinny has anorexia and the reason for a light weight is not necessarily a consequence of something negative at all.

In the classical ballet repertoire, you find sylphs, fairies, ethereal creatures with a graceful beauty. To represent these characters, to danse them, you have to be like that not to create a grotesque impression. And still to jump high in the air the danser has to know how to be heavy. She has to understand the gravity and how it can support her.

These same elements are present when we practice asanas in yoga. The body should be rooted by the feet to the ground, the energy concentrated in the pelvis. These two factors allow the upper body to be light. This kind of physical balance is very rare in nowadays world even among those who have a daily physical practice.

In my work as a yoga teacher I meet people of all sizes and of great variety of weights. All the heavy bodies have a natural propensity downwards. But what is amazing is that not all the light bodies are attracted upwards! Sometimes big people have a body which is light to ajust and which has incredibly vigorous movements and light energy. Or vice versa, some slim people can be heavy and have dull movements.

A light person can have a heavy energy. What is this heaviness then, if the body is light? When someone with a quite impressive body weight can perform vivacious movements, where does this bubbliness come from? Isn’t it interesting? In my mind, it’s all about emotions that reside in our vital energy (prana). When the prana is heavy or stationary, we become heavy no matter the weight of the body. When we really can allow ourselves to feel our weight, we can also feel the lightness. These two polarities are indispensable for our balance.

Emotionally it’s about inhabiting our body and being in it consciously with all our weight. If we usually are capable of living a large scale of emotions, our body feels it and remains functional. If we live narrowly, the body shows the symptoms of this suffering sooner or later. If we loose this emotional richness and the sensation of weight which is equal to feeling secure, we might start to manipulate these feelings by eating too much or too little. Anorexia among other eating disorders is a very natural result of a body where the energy movement is restricted. The body shrinks and wants to disppear, because it’s of no use.

We have to live both the heaviness and the lightness emotionally. We need to give power and weight to the expression of our emotions in our body. This is the way the body remains happy and expressive.